A couple in their thirties, a very cute dog, a new house with a garden: the story that Oleksandr Mykhed wanted to tell began like those posters that Kyiv residents used to see on their billboards before the war: "Come and live in Bucha," "The countryside 20 minutes from Kyiv." Back then, this little town was a booming residential suburb and a promise of domestic bliss. Twenty-five kilometers from the heart of the capital, you could find a real "townhouse" for the price of a studio apartment.

In 2018, Mykhed, not yet 30 at the time but already a promising writer, bought a "two-story" home in Hostomel on the outskirts of Bucha, he told Le Monde in a café-restaurant in the center of Kyiv. Mykhed belongs to the young Ukrainian intellectual elite whose lives were violently shattered by the war. He joined his country's armed forces and his meticulous account of the past two years, at the heart of the war and up close to the traumas of bodies and minds, resonated like an incredible fable – a Ukrainian fable.

In Hostomel, his house was located in a newly built neighborhood where the streets, on the edge of a pine forest, bore cheerful names without heroes or cumbersome pasts like "Picturesque Alley" and "Sunny Lane." "We lived happily with my wife Olena and our dog Lisa ['fox' in Ukrainian]," a pretty little ginger and white animal with a pointed muzzle whose photo he showed on his phone. On Saturday evenings, they enjoyed a shrimp curry with white wine and friends, and in summer, a siesta in the sun on the garden grass. On Sunday mornings, the young couple would order eggs Benedict from Bucha's Monocle, a cozy tearoom, before stopping off at Oleksiy's Zvirutti pet store. Lisa ran behind her masters' bicycles to the apartment into which Mykhed 's parents had finally moved, in the spring of 2021, to be closer to their son. It had a balcony overlooking the forest on the 7^th floor of a residential building in Bucha. An unobstructed view, it was the perfect place to admire sunsets over the municipal park and, in the distance, Hostomel airport.

Oleksandr's father, Professor Pavlo Volodymyrovych Mykhed, doctor of philology, heads the Slavic Literature Department at the Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the Ukrainian National Academy of Sciences. A great Gogol specialist, he had taken to sitting on the balcony of his new "home" to read and work. His wife, Tetyana, a professor at the National University of Kyiv, teaches contemporary and mid-19^th-century American literature. Two academics, two intellectual "luminaries," two eternal enthusiasts in their 70s.

You have 85.71% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.